This term, Tricycle Readers reads have included short stories from Chinua Achebe, Rose Tremaine, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, and Nadine Gordimer. All these classic writers provide profound insights into the human condition through single scenes and/or singular narratives. People assume writing shorts is easier than writing novels. That isn’t necessarily true. Characters and situations have to […]

After an Easter break, Tricycle Readers is back in the Paintbox Space at the Tricycle Theatre on the evening of Monday April 20. If you are inclined to join us, please do – we have work from Graham Swift and Stevie Smith. Later this term we are lucky to be hosting Zadie Smith who’ll be […]

In recent weeks there’ve been few points of light to lift a work-strewn, chore-heavy, deadline-driven, and often bleak midwinter landscape. Angela Carter’s classic gothic tale, The Company of Wolves, rich with evocative prose from the shape-shifting heart of a forest teeming with lycanthropes, captures the mood of the season perfectly. We read it this week […]

Light matters. This is the first discovery on moving our Tricycle Readers meetings to evenings. It’s easy to follow a story on the page when a room is flooded with natural light, but electric lights cast shadows and create dark patches. Having struggled a little with Kazoo Ishiguro last Monday, this week I set our […]

Our household was alive with the sound of viruses over the seasonal break: grunting, coughing, hawking, hurrumphing, sighing, spluttering, mewling, puking… The medicine cabinet was refilled every 48 hours. Then there was the daughter who spent six days in hospital after an elbow piercing turned septic, but that’s a story in itself. What is it […]

On Monday, Tricycle Readers analysed a story by Salman Rushdie. After the reading, one of the group admitted she’d struggled to listen because she doesn’t like Rushdie: ‘He has a mean face. He doesn’t look a nice man’. I was taken aback but not in a position to challenge her as, the previous night in […]

Until recently the Royal Literary Fund’s website was, like the organisation, discreet and traditional. The pages were the colour of parchment, like leaves from leather-bound books found on second-hand stalls at Sunday markets; like the 1970s newspaper cuttings that fall from my mother’s cookery books – forgotten recipes for avocado mousse or ten tricks with red salmon. […]